If you want to feel better about yourself, go to Fiji. Almost everyone treats you as an immediate friend, making you feel guilty for having a hangover and dealing with them as if they were some kind of talking vertical cesspit, but at all other times this is a marvellous feature of society.
Taking a trip to the Yasawa islands requires amazingly little planning or effort, although in hindsight this was perhaps a bit of a warning sign, for anyone who might not like being managed and directed to go everywhere at all times.
Despite a couple of minor rebellions though, I was happy to live under the rule of Awesome Adventures, the larger of two companies that cruise from Denarau, near Nadi, to tour the nearby island groups of the closer and smaller Mamanucas, and the distinctly larger and slightly more distant yasawas.
All inter-island transport is conducted aboard a single flagship vessel, a large catamaran of maybe 60 tons named the Yasawa Flyer 2, leading to inevitable dry ruminations on how the YF 1 was sunk and which senior position that captain now holds in the company. The first leg aboard took me through the calm and shallow waters, by pacific standards at least, to the top of the group and my first resort whereupon a small motor launch took a group of us ashore, between the twin house reefs and across almost inconceivably glass-like water.
In fact I spent so much time on boats that week I practically had a right to walk around on land like Jack Sparrow rather than just the desire to. At least every day I had been on one and most days been on three or four different craft, very good for the old English seafaring spirit, or something like that, and all thankfully on calmer waters than the shark dive amid heavy rollers back in Bega lagoon. That really was something else, believe me. In fact I'm going to post the vi- yes, in fact I just have (this time- travelling of tenses is fun, isn't it?) posted it.
But of course you already know that by now 
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Throughout the Yasawa island group, resorts are dotted along the more accessible parts of the coast usually near or even built in to villages where the company draws most of its employees from for each site, although many of the frontline staff on the travel desks, activity guides and the resort managers were from Suva and Nadi on the main island, probably due to there being more chance and more candidates from those parts who speak fluent and business English, the latter being something I have no knowledge of myself, thank the good lord; sing his praises eternally.
Resorts here are the better kind - authentic huts, dorms and offices made by hand from locally cut trees and thatched with woven coconut palm leaves, all tied together with coconut-husk twine and open to the air, although unfortunately open to the mosquitos. Also spiders, as I found a three-inche-long dead one by my bed one morning, apparently I had squashed it from this existence when I trotted to the bathroom in the night. Yes, Fijian spiders are poisonous, but only a bit. English and an internationally-sponsored fighting weight seemed to win.
I may have been unlucky in getting to the best resort first, but hopefully the guys I met there (Vanessa, and a Kiwi of uncertain provenance and unchartable cynicism using the name Graham), both of whom recieved my appalingly cheap `business cards`, will get in touch. It'd be nice, so when you read this guys, drop me a message.
And I'm sorry, Graham, I made some of that up. It sounded good.
Having two nights at a place could have led me to think I could take things easy a few months ago, but I know better now and know that two night means one usable day, and consider yourself lucky if you get anything more than meals and a nice view on days you travel. That day at the Coral View resort was pretty splendid though, taking a trip with a boatfull of other guests to the caves used in the filming of some old film called Blue Lagoon from the late '80s or early '90s starring Brooke Shields, and endlessly rammed down the throat of guests by everyone on the islands employed by Awesome Adventures, which is everyone.
I am a huge film fan (nerd) and have seen really rather a lot of movies (because my name is Tim, and I am a geek; It's been three hours since my last screening) yet I have never seen Blue Lagoon, preferring only to watch films that are good.
Or at a push, slickly bad enough to be entertaining.
Such things as Night At The Museum are okay, because they are very bad films with very good effects and a few passable actors committing only slightly bad acting. Ideal hangover material, or for those times when you don;t want to really watch a movie so mush as see some animation in front of your eyes while you think serious thoughts.
Anything with Brooke Shields in contains at least one very bad actor and no-one involved with the projects possessing balls enough to tell everyone else about it, and probably tries to be serious when all it should do is try to be over. So no, I have not see Blue Lagoon and do not know how famous these caves could almost have been, although they were very pretty, and there is a short underwater dive from one cavern to another which I would never have been able to do had I not already learned how to scuba dive. As it was it was amazing how briefly I was underwater, and not just because the tunnel was only about five feet long.
I can't tread water very well though, being for some reason a natural sinker, and so it would have been nice if the guide hadn't stoppped to give the lecture inside the second cavern while I was the only person without a space on the walls to hang on to. Still, did me some good, I'm sure, to be constantly on the edge of panic while in an almost pitch-black cave
Back at the resort after the half-hour ride in another speedboat, and I raced to hire some snorkelling gear (mask, fins, snorkel, childlike sense of wonderment and childlike ability to sense danger, as we shall see) because I had for that wonderful day been granted the ability to see. It was a miracle, a wonderful working of some higher mysterious power, and had I not been held down by two people again while a third (Vanessa, to whom I am forever slightly in debt) shoved contact lenses into my eye sockets I might have started believing something was out there.
Again we went through the circus that is me trying to see like normal people, and again it was marvelous and amazing and wonderful in every way, apart from the first bit when my eyes water like taps as other people poke my eyes, albeit in a kind and helpful fashion.
Out above one of the house reefs there were another great multitude of fish to see, almost none of which I could name and even less could I care having seen them as it was, as always, an amazing and beautiful experience, more so now I have become comfortable with diving and happily thrust myself down through the water half a dozen feet to get a closer look at various underwater sights.
I saw a massive number of blue sea stars there which were sometimes massive in themselves, and I think I finally twigged the difference between starfish and sea stars, obvious as it may be to anyone looking in a book, but never have looked in a book, just at a couple of each in the wild. It is ( I think) that the stars have five (or more, brittle stars have up to twelve, or something like that) `arms` radiating from their centre, equal in thickness all the way and without any larger mass at the centre, and the arms of starfish come out in a classic pentangular star tapering to smooth points, making them chunky, as opposed to spindly like sea stars.
Less fascinating and a good deal more dangerous was almost being hit by the propellor of a boat as I lazed around on the surface. I was absolutely in the wrong place, but where the boats went and where snorkeling was supposed to be enjoyed were explained in a way I can only call assuming, i.e. various people assumed I'd been paying attention on the boat on the way in, assumed I could take directions as well as a child, and assumed I wasn't the type of person to see dozens of other ways to interpret things due to an annoying habit of noticing extra details, such as people using the wrong words to describe things and not telling me where important things were. Anyway the water was so clear the pilot could easily see me and stopped well in time, although I had heard the engine and was quietly pondering what the hell it was as I gazed at the aquatic scenery. The people of the boat told me to go on the other side of the barrier, which I did, and successfully managed to nearly be struck by another boat two minutes later, which they did not tell me to do but I seemed to want to try my luck that day. I dived to see a particular fish and must have propelled myself beneath the rope barrier several feet below, I can only assume.
Straight afterwards, still with my contact lenses in (and did I tell you about getting them, in Suva? Long bus ride in, long ride back, demented wheelbarrowing men attacking the luggage ports as we pulled into the station? Oh yes, I did tell you.) and not wanting to waste the opportunity of real eyesight, I carried on the watery theme and went diving, not too far down just to a depth of about metres (49 feet) or so, and supposedly on a drift dive whereby an established and predictable undersea current would drift us - myself and two local divers, one of whom is by custom and practice (if not by law) qualifed at least as a Divemaster - about 120 metres along and around the edge of a large reef.
The ground at that depth was disappointingly barren and the sea life was nowhere nearly as abundant as the other dives I had been on, but there were a huge number of giant clams, and although not quite as massive as the imagination may once have painted (I read the wrong kind of novels about the South Seas as a kid, like the ones that appeal to a child's imagination, or, in adult terms, lie completely to the reader) they still are pretty giant, some of them getting upwards of a foot across and with hugely crimped lips to their shells. I have yet to see ones a metre or more wide, but hopefully will one day.
What was extremely cool was a small school - a classrom, if you will - of hunting barracuda, and they really were big. At least 4 and maybe up to five feet long, 7 or 8 barracuda were stalking shoal of a hundred or so smaller fish, surely waiting for the moment to strike although unfortunately they didn't think it timely to attack while we were there. Shame, would ahve loved to see fish hunting fish underwater, make me feel almost like a proper travel hack or something 
The only slight technical hitch apart from needing an extra weight on my belt as alway seems to happen, was that my BDC (Buoyancy control device, in reality the waistcoat-like jacket that plays host to your entire set of gear, but essentially a couple of bladders linked to your air tank via a low-pressure hose and a couple of switches to inflate/deflate it) was leaking, hardly an ideal situation for a number of reasons I won't go into, but basically I ascended far too fast near the end of the dive; an inadvisable practice that can lead to paralysis and death on deeper dives; and came within a metre of being struck by yet another speedboat, and this one was going far too fast in water far too impenetrable to be able to do anything to avoid me.
Again, a number of boring, complicated proximate reasons were behind this, the primary one being leaky equipment. Almost a very sad day, a damn good job the divers I was with were quick with their frantic underwater signalling.
Back on land for the second night and a feat of championship-standard drinking, Graham and Vanessa and a couple of English lads out and about around the world all sat around and we all got mightily sloshed, there was a great auctioning of hermit crabs - grab a bunch of them from the beach and paint a number on each of their shells (different numbers help ) and pop them in a circle drawn on the floor and see which one makes it to the edge first, and you have a crab race - where our table of five drunkards bought nine of the sixteen or so contender crabs, leaving the other ten tables to scrabble over the rest and us to eventually take all five top prizes, of which I believe we left all of them on the table at the end of the night. The fact I can remember no more of things that evening, apart from Graham entertaining us with tales of his batty fishing mate Bill who loved nothing more than piloting a shitty old boat out into the Pacific currents with no spare fuel and no radio or any other way of saving themselves if the engine conked out, just about says it all, really.
Leaving the next day was easy and pleasant, no cruel early morning wake-up calls or any nonsense like that and I was off and away to a cruise on the Wana Taki, which was largely a non-event once I got there. Aboard, and a huge boring man gave the five of us who had hopped off the Yasawa Flyer 2 a huge boring lecture without saying anything at all new, and I knew then once he had started that I had made a bad choice in coming along for this thing.
Nevertheless there were a couple of distractions; a launch from the Wana Taki out past the bluff of a nearby island to view the sunset, and later that night a few interesting games, not least of which a crab race which I won having sneakily assessed the field by looking at the bowl of crabs beforehand, and picking the one with the biggest leg-size-to-shell-size ratio that was giving a good go at escaping, and comfortably won. There were some other things to do, the ultimate forfeit being that the losing team was sent to dance around a support pole in the manner of those ladies who dance 'round poles and remove their clothing in order to part men from money. They gave it a jolly good show, I must say, and that Japanese guy seemed to really know what he was doing, that's all I'm saying.
The four folk I got on with were a funny lot really, and it only took half an hour after the lecture for them to start going on about the food at every place they had been to - now really, I have to stop you there, folks. As I had been talking about with Graham the night before, it seems to me absolutely insane to go on holiday for the food. It is a nice bonus to have great food and interesting new styles of cuisine, yes, but to actually plan where to go based on that??! What the bloody hell is wrong with some people?! Halfway around the globe and they will actually refuse to visit a whole country - an entire country - because of their perceptions regarding food there.
And, perhaps even more insanely, people will go to a foreign country for nothing BUT the food; and basically see fuck-all of the entire nation outside of a handful of restaurants and a hotel or two.
Nevermind that there are a dozen different things to eat in even the most spartan and single-minded of places, nevermind that it's a vital part of human experience to try things out of your comfort zone, nevermind that you can eat absolutely any cuisine style and dish from any and every place on Earth in every Westernised country - why not go abroad to stay in the same little bubble you've always known. Muppets. Crazies. Candidates for a Damn Good kicking every one of them.
So I transfered late the next day after a seeming eternity left aboard the Wana Taki, and took to the YF2 once more by way of a couple of short trips on motorboats skipping again over the staggeringly crystaline waters that distinguish Fiji as one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Gliding into the next resort was a solo affair for me, or rather a solo affair for tourists and only three Fijian locals to accompany me, one of whom was to be my guide and general nefarious accomplice for the next few days, although I could almost never then, and cannot now, accurately recall his name. My excuse, as always in these circumstances is that I don't know how to pronounce the local language or spell the word, the one necessitating the other, which hardly excuse me for not sitting down and learning it of an evening, but still.
WayaLeiLei was the third resort, second island, second dive site and second best of the lot, and pretty damn marvellous it was, even if the kitchen/serving crew had seen a few too many tourists for their own good by the time I arrived. Ashore once more after a day and a half over waves and, with the sun shining, I booked myself in for the morning hike to the summit of a massive boulder outcrop atop the hill, this resort being perched on the side of what must have been a massive piece of volcanic fallout, as all the boulders were fully formed blocks of hardened stone, probably expelled as one of larger islands was formed as a surface-breaching volcano.
Cool thing about the Yasawa group is that they are entirely volcanic islands, one way or another. Every one was directly or from subsequent ash and explosions formed by volcanic activity, or as I like to think of it, truly unimagineable power right here on Earth including big massive way-cool explosions an' lava an' stuff. Just imagine it. A volcano erupting, I mean. I'm so very terrified of natural forces, I have to see one
The summit trek seemed like a bad idea almost as soon as it started. 04:45 in the AM saw me walking across the resort between bures; those same traditional hand-built huts seen in all the resorts and elsewhere throughout rural Fiji; to the kitchen and eating area, being molested by frantic dark shapes in the tar-black night which turned out to be a couple of the resident dogs, apparently having had their Pedigree Cocaine already they were unbelievably enthusiastic and a little terrifying as they tried to climb up my front and back simultaneously, and then I noticed a couple of dim lights and found the little group preparing to make the ascent.
Five of us altogether went up, my faithful guide in the rear and the male compnent of a German couple in the front, storming up the cliff in the darkness with the help of his torch, the lady of the outfit behind with hers, the idiot boy (guess who that is) very close behind her with no torch at all, relying on her second-hand light and footsteps in the blackness, and then our guide and a little Glaswegian girl who struggled with it all, and was being helped and occasionally hoisted up the rocky track by our guide. I'm gonna call him Bob from here on in just for the sake of convenience.
I was struggling too, seriously so. The path was all uphill on an angle of maybe 30 - 40 degrees, 45 minutes almost totally solid smashing ourselves up through the trees and over the rocks with only three breaks of two minutes. Calling it a path was, in places, very generous as well because after the first half or so any kind of trodden or smooth surface gave way to the results of the most recent landslide, and we were climbing on and over boulders and shale - in the middle of a jungle mind, dodging half-seen trees and branches placed treacherously at neck height in the pitch-black-to-very-dim morning light, and being in that jungle with an almost perpetual canopy above meant we were in the darkness, and a better quality of darkness at that, for longer than the world outside.
Breaching the forest at last, just 20 metres from the summit and lookout point at exactly 06:00am we all nearly collapsed and waited for sunrise, or at least the girls and I collapsed, the German fella would clearly have liked to have been going faster but had to slow enough for his girlfriend to keep up, and of course Bob hardly noticed he was even moving, let alone climbing a bastard of a hill under cover of darkness. Bob went up to the peak almost ever single morning, and, would you believe, the dogs went with him as they had done today, and it seems their favourite pasttime is in fact to run up this hill and stand atop the Easterly pinnacle of the summit rock to watch the sunrise themselves, and feel the wind racing through their fur. I have photos of them looking like doggie pioneers up there.
Going back down Bob asks us if we want to go the `man's way or the woman's way` with a cheeky misogynist's grin. I elect for the group the way of the small crippled girl-child, to general agreement, and Bob takes us back halfway down through easy gentle slopes across rolling fields at the back of the hill. In the inky darkness, the cheeky bugger had led us up the most difficult route. Total git.
Later on I tried to go kayaking but no-one else wanted to, althoguh there was a guided tour set out in the promotional material for that day and I had, after all, paid for the all-extras-included package, the summit trek being one thing also the cave tour from the first resort, and the kayak tour another one. But hey, I went o the dive shop to reschedule and they rescheduled me, doing the dive as they were a couple of hours before we had planned.
Out over the reef and things were vibrant and teeming as anything I'd yet seen, with the added bonuses that 1) My BCD and gear in general was not leaking, and 2) My two companions were doing a spot of underwater spear fishing in order to try and attract and feed some sharks.
After skewering a couple of rainbow runners and something else I couldn't identify, and thousands of small fish from the size of matchboxes to that of shoeboxes having come and pecked and munched recycled their fallen comrades, a couple of white-tipped reef sharks appeared and lazily hung about the reef a few metres below us, only making one pass to grab food from our diver thatI saw, but they came close enough and were small, but magnificent nonetheless.
White-tip reefs don't get very big and these ones were maybe four feet long nose to tail, but it still adds another shark to my scoresheet, as it were, and they have the most amazingly lithe way of moving that their bulky bigger cousins can never manage.
Unfortunately I had not been wearing a wetsuit - the water was 29 degrees C after all - and, wearing trousers rolled up to the knee which inevitably unfurled themselves, I had been propelling myself about underwater for the best part of an hour with a massive extra resistance thanks to the heavy flapping trousers, and when I reached the surface I got the most evil cramp and had to float about uselessly near the boat while I sorted it out. I really should have thought about that, expecially after an hour and a half of early morning trekking that day and, well, there was no way I could do another dive, and I had a strained tendon for the next few days.
And the next day, yet again aboard the YF2 and off to South Sea Island for one night, the smallest in the whole group being only about 130 metres from shore to shore. Nice little place with some agreeable folk, but the bedbugs were something evil. Lovely sunset though and wide coral-strewn beaches refreshingly free from coconut palsm, for once.
The next and final day and I went aboard the last of my paid-for included extras (after a trip on the YF2 again and a couple of motor launches, natch) which was a sailing tour of the Mamanuca group aboard the Seaspray, a sailing yacht of maybe 90 feet, with about 40 guests and an open bar, or at least an open cool box stocked with beer and a few bottles of wine and champers, to which I settled down having struck up conversation with a young Aussie bloke and then another Aussie couple of Japanese extraction and two Brits, who between us polished off every bottle of wine and champange in the cool boxes bar one, and as much beer as everyone else. Yes, we were bastards, but if it's any consolation I got a near-fatal round of hiccoughs and had force myself to throw up lavishly in the head, for the sake of ot hiccuping out a lung.
More beer and some cruising later we fetched up alongside a lovely little island with a delapidated reef but some lovely scenery, and I managed to snorkel-swim to shore with the rest of the lively guests despite having to stop, tread water and empty my mask of water every 15 seconds thanks to my glasses forcing the sides away from my head, not having brought my contact lenses or really trusting any of the feckless drunkards aboard with my eyes either, really.
Back aboard, a bit of sunburn and a lot of drunk and disorderly later, then back out to sea to rendezvous with the YF2 for the final time, then into port and off to a single night's stay at the Kennedy near the airport and back the following day on a plane home.
Well, I call it home for now. New Zealand really is the most agreeable and homey place I've ever been to, and you shall see why very soon.
Tim i hope you are aware that this blog is 4587 words long, i copied and pasted it into word as i am a big wierdo!!! Your blogs are certainly proving more than a little light reading!! Good still none the less.